Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow

  She came out of the crowd and bounded toward us. Darryl has had a thing for Van since forever, and she’s sweet enough to pretend she doesn’t know it. She gave me a hug and then moved onto Darryl, giving him a quick sisterly kiss on the cheek that made him go red to the tops of his ears.

  The two of them made a funny pair: Darryl is a little on the heavy side, though he wears it well, and he’s got a kind of pink complexion that goes red in the cheeks whenever he runs or gets excited. He’s been able to grow a beard since we were fourteen, but thankfully he started shaving after a brief period known to our gang as “the Lincoln years.” And he’s tall. Very, very tall. Like basketball player tall.

  Meanwhile, Van is half a head shorter than me, and skinny, with straight black hair that she wears in crazy, elaborate braids that she researches on the net. She’s got pretty coppery skin and dark eyes, and she loves big glass rings the size of radishes, which click and clack together when she dances.

  “Where’s Jolu?” she said.

  “How are you, Van?” Darryl asked in a choked voice. He always ran a step behind the conversation when it came to Van.

  “I’m great, D. How’s your every little thing?” Oh, she was a bad, bad person. Darryl nearly fainted.

  Jolu saved him from social disgrace by showing up just then, in an oversize leather baseball jacket, sharp sneakers, and a mesh-back cap advertising our favorite Mexican masked wrestler, El Santo Junior. Jolu is Jose-Luis Torrez, the completing member of our foursome. He went to a super-strict Catholic school in the Outer Richmond, so it wasn’t easy for him to get out. But he always did: no one exfiltrated like our Jolu. He liked his jacket because it hung down low—which was pretty stylish in parts of the city—and covered up all his Catholic school crap, which was like a bull’s-eye for nosy jerks with the truancy moblog bookmarked on their phones.

  “Who’s ready to go?” I asked, once we’d all said hello. I pulled out my phone and showed them the map I’d downloaded to it on the BART. “Near as I can work out, we wanna go up to the Nikko again, then one block past it to O’Farrell, then left up toward Van Ness. Somewhere in there we should find the wireless signal.”

  Van made a face. “That’s a nasty part of the Tenderloin.” I couldn’t argue with her. That part of San Francisco is one of the weird bits—you go in through the Hilton’s front entrance and it’s all touristy stuff like the cable car turnaround and family restaurants. Go through to the other side and you’re in the ’Loin, where every tracked out transvestite hooker, hard-case pimp, hissing drug dealer and cracked up homeless person in town was concentrated. What they bought and sold, none of us were old enough to be a part of (though there were plenty of hookers our age plying their trade in the ’Loin).

  “Look on the bright side,” I said. “The only time you want to go up around there is broad daylight. None of the other players are going to go near it until tomorrow at the earliest. This is what we in the ARG business call a monster head start.”

  Jolu grinned at me. “You make it sound like a good thing,” he said.

  “Beats eating uni,” I said.

  “We going to talk or we going to win?” Van said. After me, she was hands down the most hardcore player in our group. She took winning very, very seriously.

  We struck out, four good friends, on our way to decode a clue, win the game—and lose everything we cared about, forever.

  The physical component of today’s clue was a set of GPS coordinates—there were coordinates for all the major cities where Harajuku Fun Madness was played—where we’d find a WiFi access point’s signal. That signal was being deliberately jammed by another, nearby WiFi point that was hidden so that it couldn’t be spotted by conventional wifinders, little key-fobs that told you when you were within range of someone’s open access point, which you could use for free.

  We’d have to track down the location of the “hidden” access point by measuring the strength of the “visible” one, finding the spot where it was most mysteriously weakest. There we’d find another clue—last time it had been in the special of the day at Anzu, the swanky sushi restaurant in the Nikko hotel in the Tenderloin. The Nikko was owned by Japan Airlines, one of Harajuku Fun Madness’s sponsors, and the staff had all made a big fuss over us when we finally tracked down the clue. They’d given us bowls of miso soup and made us try uni, which is sushi made from sea urchin, with the texture of very runny cheese and a smell like very runny dog droppings. But it tasted really good. Or so Darryl told me. I wasn’t going to eat that stuff.

  I picked up the WiFi signal with my phone’s wifinder about three blocks up O’Farrell, just before Hyde Street, in front of a dodgy “Asian Massage Parlor” with a red blinking CLOSED sign in the window. The network’s name was HarajukuFM, so we knew we had the right spot.

  “If it’s in there, I’m not going,” Darryl said.

  “You all got your wifinders?” I said.

  Darryl and Van had phones with built-in wifinders, while Jolu, being too cool to carry a phone bigger than his pinky finger, had a separate little directional fob.

  “Okay, fan out and see what we see. You’re looking for a sharp drop-off in the signal that gets worse the more you move along it.”

  I took a step backwards and ended up standing on someone’s toes. A female voice said “oof” and I spun around, worried that some crack ho was going to stab me for breaking her heels.

  Instead, I found myself face to face with another kid my age. She had a shock of bright pink hair and a sharp, rodentlike face, with big sunglasses that were practically Air Force goggles. She was dressed in striped tights beneath a black granny dress, with lots of little Japanese decorer toys safety pinned to it—anime characters, old world leaders, emblems from foreign soda pop.

  She held up a camera and snapped a picture of me and my crew.

  “Cheese,” she said. “You’re on candid snitch-cam.”

  “No way,” I said. “You wouldn’t—”

  “I will,” she said. “I will send this photo to truant watch in thirty seconds unless you four back off from this clue and let me and my friends here run it down. You can come back in one hour and it’ll be all yours. I think that’s more than fair.”

  I looked behind her and noticed three other girls in similar garb—one with blue hair, one with green, and one with purple. “Who are you supposed to be, the Popsicle Squad?”

  “We’re the team that’s going to kick your team’s ass at Harajuku Fun Madness,” she said. “And I’m the one who’s right this second about to upload your photo and get you in so much trouble—”

  Behind me I felt Van start forward. Her all-girls school was notorious for its brawls, and I was pretty sure she was ready to knock this chick’s block off.

  Then the world changed forever.

  We felt it first, that sickening lurch of the cement under your feet that every Californian knows instinctively—earthquake. My first inclination, as always, was to get away: “When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.” But the fact was, we were already in the safest place we could be, not in a building that could fall in on us, not out toward the middle of the road where bits of falling mortice could brain us.

  Earthquakes are eerily quiet—at first, anyway—but this wasn’t quiet. This was loud, an incredible roaring sound that was louder than anything I’d ever heard before. The sound was so punishing it drove me to my knees, and I wasn’t the only one. Darryl shook my arm and pointed over the buildings and we saw it then: a huge black cloud rising from the northeast, from the direction of the Bay.

  There was another rumble, and the cloud of smoke spread out, that spreading black shape we’d all grown up seeing in movies. Someone had just blown up something, in a big way.

  There were more rumbles and more tremors. Heads appeared at windows up and down the street. We all looked at the mushroom cloud in silence.

  Then the sirens started.

  I’d heard sirens like these before—they test the civil de
fense sirens at noon on Tuesdays. But I’d only heard them go off unscheduled in old war movies and video games, the kind where someone is bombing someone else from above. Air raid sirens. The wooooooo sound made it all less real.

  “Report to shelters immediately.” It was like the voice of God, coming from all places at once. There were speakers on some of the electric poles, something I’d never noticed before, and they’d all switched on at once.

  “Report to shelters immediately.” Shelters? We looked at each other in confusion. What shelters? The cloud was rising steadily, spreading out. Was it nuclear? Were we breathing our last breaths?

  The girl with the pink hair grabbed her friends and they tore ass downhill, back toward the BART station and the foot of the hills.

  “REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY.” There was screaming now, and a lot of running around. Tourists—you can always spot the tourists, they’re the ones who think CALIFORNIA = WARM and spend their San Francisco holidays freezing in shorts and T-shirts—scattered in every direction.

  “We should go!” Darryl hollered in my ear, just barely audible over the shrieking of the sirens, which had been joined by traditional police sirens. A dozen SFPD cruisers screamed past us.

  “REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY.”

  “Down to the BART station,” I hollered. My friends nodded. We closed ranks and began to move quickly downhill.

  Chapter 3

  We passed a lot of people in the road on the way to the Powell Street BART. They were running or walking, white-faced and silent or shouting and panicked. Homeless people cowered in doorways and watched it all, while a tall black tranny hooker shouted at two mustached young men about something.

  The closer we got to the BART, the worse the press of bodies became. By the time we reached the stairway down into the station, it was a mob scene, a huge brawl of people trying to crowd their way down a narrow staircase. I had my face crushed up against someone’s back, and someone else was pressed into my back.

  Darryl was still beside me—he was big enough that he was hard to shove, and Jolu was right behind him, kind of hanging on to his waist. I spied Vanessa a few yards away, trapped by more people.

  “Screw you!” I heard Van yell behind me. “Pervert! Get your hands off of me!”

  I strained around against the crowd and saw Van looking with disgust at an older guy in a nice suit who was kind of smirking at her. She was digging in her purse and I knew what she was digging for.

  “Don’t mace him!” I shouted over the din. “You’ll get us all, too.”

  At the mention of the word mace, the guy looked scared and kind of melted back, though the crowd kept him moving forward. Up ahead, I saw someone, a middle-aged lady in a hippie dress, falter and fall. She screamed as she went down, and I saw her thrashing to get up, but she couldn’t, the crowd’s pressure was too strong. As I neared her, I bent to help her up, and was nearly knocked over her. I ended up stepping on her stomach as the crowd pushed me past her, but by then I don’t think she was feeling anything.

  I was as scared as I’d ever been. There was screaming everywhere now, and more bodies on the floor, and the press from behind was as relentless as a bulldozer. It was all I could do to keep on my feet.

  We were in the open concourse where the turnstiles were. It was hardly any better here—the enclosed space sent the voices around us echoing back in a roar that made my head ring, and the smell and feeling of all those bodies made me feel a claustrophobia I’d never known I was prone to.

  People were still cramming down the stairs, and more were squeezing past the turnstiles and down the escalators onto the platforms, but it was clear to me that this wasn’t going to have a happy ending.

  “Want to take our chances up top?” I said to Darryl.

  “Yes, hell yes,” he said. “This is vicious.”

  I looked to Vanessa—there was no way she’d hear me. I managed to get my phone out and I texted her.

  > We’re getting out of here

  I saw her feel the vibe from her phone, then look down at it and then back at me and nod vigorously. Darryl, meanwhile, had clued Jolu in.

  “What’s the plan?” Darryl shouted in my ear.

  “We’re going to have to go back!” I shouted back, pointing at the remorseless crush of bodies.

  “It’s impossible!” he said.

  “It’s just going to get more impossible the longer we wait!”

  He shrugged. Van worked her way over to me and grabbed hold of my wrist. I took Darryl’s and Darryl took Jolu by the other hand and we pushed out.

  It wasn’t easy. We moved about three inches a minute at first, then slowed down even more when we reached the stairway. The people we passed were none too happy about us shoving them out of the way, either. A couple people swore at us and there was a guy who looked like he’d have punched me if he’d been able to get his arms loose. We passed three more crushed people beneath us, but there was no way I could have helped them. By that point, I wasn’t even thinking of helping anyone. All I could think of was finding the spaces in front of us to move into, of Darryl’s mighty straining on my wrist, of my death grip on Van behind me.

  We popped free like champagne corks an eternity later, blinking in the gray smoky light. The air raid sirens were still blaring, and the sound of emergency vehicles’ sirens as they tore down Market Street was even louder. There was almost no one on the streets anymore—just the people trying hopelessly to get underground. A lot of them were crying. I spotted a bunch of empty benches—usually staked out by skanky winos—and pointed toward them.

  We moved for them, the sirens and the smoke making us duck and hunch our shoulders. We got as far as the benches before Darryl fell forward.

  We all yelled and Vanessa grabbed him and turned him over. The side of his shirt was stained red, and the stain was spreading. She tugged his shirt up and revealed a long, deep cut in his pudgy side.

  “Someone freaking stabbed him in the crowd,” Jolu said, his hands clenching into fists. “Christ, that’s vicious.”

  Darryl groaned and looked at us, then down at his side, then he groaned and his head went back again.

  Vanessa took off her jean jacket and then pulled off the cotton hoodie she was wearing underneath it. She wadded it up and pressed it to Darryl’s side. “Take his head,” she said to me. “Keep it elevated.” To Jolu she said, “Get his feet up—roll up your coat or something.” Jolu moved quickly. Vanessa’s mother is a nurse and she’d had first aid training every summer at camp. She loved to watch people in movies get their first aid wrong and make fun of them. I was so glad to have her with us.

  We sat there for a long time, holding the hoodie to Darryl’s side. He kept insisting that he was fine and that we should let him up, and Van kept telling him to shut up and lie still before she kicked his ass.

  “What about calling 911?” Jolu said.

  I felt like an idiot. I whipped my phone out and punched 911. The sound I got wasn’t even a busy signal—it was like a whimper of pain from the phone system. You don’t get sounds like that unless there’s three million people all dialing the same number at once. Who needs botnets when you’ve got terrorists?

  “What about Wikipedia?” Jolu said.

  “No phone, no data,” I said.

  “What about them?” Darryl said, and pointed at the street. I looked where he was pointing, thinking I’d see a cop or a paramedic, but there was no one there.

  “It’s okay buddy, you just rest,” I said.

  “No, you idiot, what about them, the cops in the cars? There!”

  He was right. Every five seconds, a cop car, an ambulance or a firetruck zoomed past. They could get us some help. I was such an idiot.

  “Come on, then,” I said, “let’s get you where they can see you and flag one down.”

  Vanessa didn’t like it, but I figured a cop wasn’t going to stop for a kid waving his hat in the street, not that day. They just might stop if they saw Darryl bleeding there, thoug
h. I argued briefly with her and Darryl settled it by lurching to his feet and dragging himself down toward Market Street.

  The first vehicle that screamed past—an ambulance—didn’t even slow down. Neither did the cop car that went past, nor the fire truck, nor the next three cop cars. Darryl wasn’t in good shape—he was white-faced and panting. Van’s sweater was soaked in blood.

  I was sick of cars driving right past me. The next time a car appeared down Market Street, I stepped right out into the road, waving my arms over my head, shouting “STOP.” The car slowed to a stop and only then did I notice that it wasn’t a cop car, ambulance or fire engine.

  It was a military-looking Jeep, like an armored Hummer, only it didn’t have any military insignia on it. The car skidded to a stop just in front of me, and I jumped back and lost my balance and ended up on the road. I felt the doors open near me, and then saw a confusion of booted feet moving close by. I looked up and saw a bunch of military-looking guys in coveralls, holding big, bulky rifles and wearing hooded gas masks with tinted faceplates.

  I barely had time to register them before those rifles were pointed at me. I’d never looked down the barrel of a gun before, but everything you’ve heard about the experience is true. You freeze where you are, time stops, and your heart thunders in your ears. I opened my mouth, then shut it, then, very slowly, I held my hands up in front of me.

  The faceless, eyeless armed man above me kept his gun very level. I didn’t even breathe. Van was screaming something and Jolu was shouting and I looked at them for a second and that was when someone put a coarse sack over my head and cinched it tight around my windpipe, so quick and so fiercely I barely had time to gasp before it was locked on me. I was pushed roughly but dispassionately onto my stomach and something went twice around my wrists and then tightened up as well, feeling like baling wire and biting cruelly. I cried out and my own voice was muffled by the hood.

  I was in total darkness now and I strained my ears to hear what was going on with my friends. I heard them shouting through the muffling canvas of the bag, and then I was being impersonally hauled to my feet by my wrists, my arms wrenched up behind my back, my shoulders screaming.